Featured Awards – October 2012

Eden Kyse (Center for Research and Evaluation on Education and Human Services (CREEHS), CEHS) received a contract from the Paterson Public Schools for $80,000 for the project entitled “Paterson Public Schools—District Procedural Manual.” CREEHS, along with CEHS faculty, consultants, and district representatives will collaborate on the development of a District Procedural Manual for the district’s Special Programs (e.g., special education, bilingual/ESL, gifted and talented). The manual will be aligned with federal and state requirements and with day-to-day best practices in the district’s schools. The team also will prepare a professional development plan for training stakeholders that will use the manual (e.g., district and school administrators and staff, parents).

The NJ Council for the Humanities awarded Victoria Larson (Classics and General Humanities, CHSS) $3,000 for “Jersey: A Sense of Place.” This series of five presentations will explore the role of New Jersey and/or places within it as a source of inspiration for the arts and humanities (drama, literature, music, painting), past and present, as well as for experiments in living. In so doing, they will show, too, both how our concept and lived experience of “Jersey”—as, indeed, of any place—is reciprocally modified by artistic representations of it, as well as how the “local” can become exemplary of the “universal.”

Robert McCormick (Center for Child Advocacy, CHSS) received a $131,702 subcontract from Rutgers University for “SHIP: Summer Housing and Internship Program 2012-2013.” SHIP is a twelve-week program from May to August that offers an alternative to recipients of the New Jersey Foster Care scholarship who lack the financial, family, and social connections to secure safe and stable housing in the summer months. Students between the ages of 18 and 21 are given the opportunity to receive quality housing and paid internship positions throughout the summer months. The program provides for weekly workshops and recreational activities for the participants. This summer, the program is being extended to include MSU students.

The National Science Foundation awarded Sandra Passchier (Earth & Environmental Studies, CSAM) $118,937 for “The Stratigraphic Expression of the Onset of Glaciation in Eocene-Oligocene Successions on the Antarctic Continental Margin,” which aims to investigate glacial advance and retreat of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet through the Eocene-Oligocene transition. The project will test the leading hypotheses about the onset of Antarctic glaciation and CO2 thresholds.

Robert Prezant (Dean, CSAM) and Quinn Vega (Biology & Molecular Biology, CSAM) received a $112,137 subaward from Rutgers University for the fourth and final year of “LSAMP: The Garden State Alliance for Minority Participation.” Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the goal of this project is to increase the participation of African American and Hispanic students in the sciences and address the national shortage of STEM-trained professionals from underrepresented minority groups.